


Hey, Does Amazon Deliver To Silent Hill?

by smileyfacegauges



Category: Silent Hill (Video Game Series), Silent Hill 2 - Fandom
Genre: Bad Puns, Banter, Bonus Scene, Christmas, Christmas Fluff, Fun, Gen, Holidays, Interlude, M/M, Silent Hill - Freeform, bonus goomt scene for the holidays, i did not touch this at all for editing so have some raw writing, silent hill minding its own business for once, unedited
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-26
Updated: 2020-12-26
Packaged: 2021-03-11 04:15:17
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,076
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28345248
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/smileyfacegauges/pseuds/smileyfacegauges
Summary: I bet the shipping fee sucks.(Bonus holiday scene for Get Out Of My Town.)
Relationships: (non romantic at this time), Harry Mason/James Sunderland
Comments: 7
Kudos: 12





	Hey, Does Amazon Deliver To Silent Hill?

**Author's Note:**

> Unedited and done for funsies! Happy belated holidays all around, you filthy animals.

Harry stretched out his legs and crossed one ankle over the other, getting all nice and comfortable on the park bench. His rusty steel pipe leaned against seat’s edge just in case it was needed. He linked, then rested his hands on his lap, dipped back his head, and smiled up ata grey sky, and the snowflakes that fell everlasting.

“Mmmm. I wonder if it’s Christmas yet,” he remarked, blowing puffs of air up into the drift, just to see if he could make them dance. “That’d kinda suck.”

James scuffed his shoe when he partially turned to look back at Harry. Never expecting an answer, acknowledgment, or even a toot his way whenever he spoke, the author in question kept on as though he were alone; which, really, could be considered often. “I had a few things comin’ in the mail for Heather,” he continued to his unwilling audience. “Never too damn early to start Christmas shopping. Everything turns to shit with retailers the closer you get. Not to fuckin’ mention online shopping. Piece of shit.”

Lifting his head, Harry set his eyes on James standing a few feet away. Father and conduit considered one another until a cheeky smile prompted a soft frown. James eyeballed him. “What?”

“Y’know, James, I think you’re probably one of the most frustrating people to get gifts for,” observed someone whose opinions weren’t asked for. “You’re probably that type where you’d _think_ it’d be easy to figure you out - like even just to get you a generic gift. Something that didn’t take a lot to hunt down, is kinda ordinary, the kind of gift when you don’t really know a person that well but hey he’d probably get a kick out of this anyway, right?”

James drew his brows together, flattening his stare. Harry inclined his head, smirking up a devilish storm and striking his thumbs against each other. (If he couldn’t be petting a huge nightmare of a white cat in his lap, this would have to do.)

“I—“

“And _yet,”_ he interrupted, not quite through with the assessment, “it’s _frustrating_ because you know that you’re gonna see _some_ disappointment when the gift’s opened because it’s not reaaaalllyyyy what they were hoping for? but it’s sooooorta cool too? so you get to panic - ‘Oh fuck, I fucked up!’” Harry gasped, shooting his hands into his hair and looking wildly about, “‘Shit! He hates it! Oh man, I look like an _asshole!_ He probably thinks I’m a fuckin’ _tool—‘“_

“You’re right, I do.”

“‘— and now I just gotta laugh it off and oh— oh, _that_ didn’t sound genuine, aw fuck he knows I know I fucked up and he’s gonna hate me even _more_ , I can’t look him in the eye anymore, I can’t do this, I guess I’ll just have to kill myself or move across the country. Welp! Do I still have that fuckin’ gun in the closet—‘“

James could only look on Harry’s theatrics. He watched the much older man drag his hands down his face in emotional turmoil, stretching his skin under his fingers, exposing the whites and reds of his eyeballs and lower lid to his only companion. The act was fucking stupid and the childish drama was hardly the worst of it.. but it was actually kinda funny this time.

So when James softly smiled (smirked? whatever, he’d take it) at his Raspberry Award-winning performance, Harry’s distorted face lit up. He clapped his hands onto his thighs and dropped back on the bench’s support, grinning up at the perpetually sad young man. Here was another moment he’d tuck very, very carefully into a nice box of memories from this miserable swamp.

“Anyway. So, make it easier on me, bud. What do you want for Christmas? Or _did,_ you want for Christmas in case Christmas has passed?”

James bent his neck to look at the ground. He didn’t have any idea. Christmas was a concept way long forgotten. “I dunno.”

“Hey, that’s swell! Makes it _tons_ easier on me, I _just_ got a huge package of ‘I dunno’ in a couple months ago.”

Then the conduit showed Harry the back of his head, looking off into the park. He was really gritting his teeth to wrangle in that idiot grin that wanted control of his face. Harry saw a few slight shakes of his head, then peered up at his stony features when James looked at him. “Fantastic. Thanks.”

“My pleasure, my treasure. Okay, but c’mon, come clean now - what was your big, white whale of a Christmas gift? Don’t be shy,” he coaxed. “If you tell me yours, I’ll tell you mine..”

Deep came the inhale, and tired went the exhale. “A mini slot machine piggy bank,” James hesitantly and, dare Harry presume to detect, meekly. “Someone’s parents had gone to Vegas and gotten them one of those. .. I thought.. it was.. cool.”

For someone that willingly spilled such a deep, dark secret, one also might as well have had placed James on the stand and have a loaded, cocked gun to his head, by the way he sounded so ashamed and guilty. Not to mention, for what it was worth, he still harbored shame for wanting the frivolous item; and guilt, for the jealousy that still remained possibly a smattering of decades later.

Harry, however, was enchanted. “A mini slot machine piggy bank,” he quietly, thoughtfully parroted. He screwed his eyes up at the sky, unknowingly dodging the hot, quick glare fired his way. “Hm. That sounds pretty cool. Was it fully functional?”

“What do you mean?”

“Like, did the arm work, could you actually make it spin?”

There was a respectful pause for James to try to pull up the memory. This was all pretty inconsequential, and the piggy bank an arcane detail. His eyes flicked over the grass like a chart recorder on a seismograph as he recalled. “.. yes. And it made noise. You could hit a jackpot,” he slowly continued. “And a.. flashing light on the top. .. yeah. I mean, it was pretty cheap, cheap junk,” James defended himself, casting a look at Harry. “But I was like.. I dunno, twelve? Eight? I thought it was cool.”

He discovered the author’s full attention lay centered on him. It immediately prickled his skin and stiffed his shoulders. Hot and indignant, James instinctively began to challenge the inquisitive, tender expression living in Harry’s eyes and face. James couldn’t ever help feeling that look came off as condescending.

It never was, of course, and he was stubborn to hypothetically apologize for the assumption.

“That _is_ cool.” A greying head ticked to the other side. “Huh. Shit. I wonder if I’d ever _seen_ them before when I was in Vegas. I fuckin’ _scoured_ gift shops to bring back something for Heather those few times I was there. .. I bet she would’ve loved one of those. Heh. Nevermind her! _I_ want one of ‘em.. dang, I love that..”

Feeling awkward and worse, vulnerable, James turned it around. “What about you?”

Harry idly scratched his throat, then captured his neck in his hand. He tilted his chin up, absently rubbing his neck from jaw to collar. “For awhile, I really wanted a train set,” he mused. “It’s kinda stereotypical and silly, but there was this train set that was a replica of a Colebrookdale Railroad train.” Dark brown eyes gazed at green. “I knew a kid whose grandfather was a train nut. Built his own replicas and terrains. It was really, really fucking cool. This was a guy’s whole life work. It was _crazy_ going down to his workshop.”

James said nothing, though the knitted creases in his forehead spelled intrigue. Harry obliged. “He had a shack, if you can call it that, or.. a small barn, where he had everything. Wall to walls shelves of trains and cars like you wouldn’t believe,” described the author with the help of his gesticulations. “He even had a track going round near the ceiling, he was _that_ kinda guy. But he’d also built a suspended bridge kinda weaving and criss-crossing overhead. It allowed two trains to work at the same time. He had them on a timer so they wouldn’t crash.

“He had trains and tickets, advertisements, banners, pieces of original trains, teacups, uh, plates and shit from the actual line’s dining cars, he had a whole sidepiece of a car bearing the name of the line - this guy’s collection was historical and _priceless._ I think that he left everything to historical societies and museums after he died. He was no joke, he didn’t fuck around. He preserved a whole bucketload of American railway history. I wouldn’t be surprised if train enthusiasts still talk about him.

“But he was this nice old man. He looked just like you probably imagine him; tall, gangly, rounded shoulders from hunching over; wore a brown leather apron all soft and scuffed up and dotted with oil and paint from all those decades of working on his trains,” Harry fondly narrated. “White hair, round glasses, had a magnifying goggle set perched on his forehead; this high collared cream shirt he always wore rolled to his elbows; patterned bowtie; bony hands that were steadier than a— _man,_ I miss him.” He laughed. James kept silent.

“Mr. Edmond Sparks. Can you fucking believe that name? Edmond Sparks. It sounds like was _born_ to work on trains, like he stepped out of a whole book series… anyway, I didn’t _actually_ want the train itself, I realized later,” he admitted, averting them to the lawn. “I just wanted Edmond to like me.”

Finally, his voice fell to rest. While Harry slipped further into cherished memories of bygone days, James studied his ward like he were a museum piece, himself. It was hard to decide what to make of him. Maybe he’d get lucky and start to decide how he even felt about him at all.

Suddenly, and startling James, Harry snapped his head up and drew a breath so deep it expanded his ribs. “But anyway!” he declared. “Since all that was actually _not_ what I really wanted for Christmas, that doesn’t count.”

Jesus goddamn Christ. “Okay. So what did you really want?”

Harry grinned from ear to ear. “There was an oddity shop downtown. They had taxidermy. They had normal taxidermy, and they had weird taxidermy,” he said, building up the punchline. “And there was this taxidermy squirrel,” the poor man began to laugh, trying to help James visualize it with vague gestures, “and it was just the most _awful_ thing; I mean, it was stupid and lewd and of course my friends thought it was funny as hell, because boys will be boys, and my parents _hated it._.”

James turned a little more to face the giggling patriarch trying to tell his story. “It was a squirrel, with a cutoff leather jacket, and a cutoff denim vest,” he described through an uncontrollable grin. It got increasingly harder to stay coherent as excitement ramped up the laughter. “With a Metallica t-shirt, and smoking a cigarette, and it had a small _Playboy_ magazine on the floor in front of it, and was bending over and looking over its shoulder..”

The mood was infectious. Harry wouldn’t know that James grinned too in anticipation; he couldn’t see anything through the laughter tears forming in his eyes. “It was so lewd and immature. It was so, _so_ stupid and— it had _nuts!_ It had almonds— almonds as— back there— almonds as his _nuts!_ ”

That was the catalyst; Harry was done for. Rich, boisterous laughter consumed him and filled their secluded little nook in the fog. One hand thudded his chest and the other smacked the bench once, then was used for gravely-needed support as he rocked and writhed with unrestrained howling.

From the way Harry promoted the dumb, raunchy taxidermy, James would’ve never guessed the outcome, but he was no less astounded. The juvenile fascination and reaction to the pornographic, stuffed squirrel was a condition directly associated with young, and teenage boys. For them, it never went out of style. In fact, a lot of those boys, now adults, retained that sort of humor they should’ve grown out of (to an extent; not even James could lie and say some gross stuff like that wasn’t funny, if done right).

And while Harry Mason, survivor of Silent Hill, doting and loving father of a teenage girl born from a god, esteemed author and respected member of the community sobbed with laughter, folded in on himself due to weak abdominal muscles unused to exercise, James bit his lip hard to keep from joining in.

It was an honorable fight.

But his shoulders shook, his chin dropped to his chest, and the damned conduit laughed along with him.

After some time, Harry began to compose himself. He dropped his back against the bench, wheezing and wiping his eyes with the backs of his hands, heel of his palm, and his wrist. Some giggles lingered while he calmed down, sniffling a little, then his hands dropped to his thighs. Harry tucked his feet under the wooden seat and blearily grinned up at James - whose demeanor was calm, yet amused. Such a rarity for the conduit brightened Harry all the more.

“So.. so, yeah,” he innocently shrugged, threading his fingers in his lap. “That’s.. my big..” he fought the snickering, “white whale..”

“That’s great, Harry.”

“Thanks.” Sandpaper on wood helped clear the gunk from his throat, or so it sounded like. “I still don’t know why my parents hated it so much.”

“It sounded like they ruined Christmas.”

“And my birthday, several years running.”

“Mm.”

The last airy chuckles left Harry, and he looked up at the only constant in Silent Hill. Mossy green eyes lifted too to watch the weightless, natural serenity drift to the earth. For a spell, they were quietly lost in their thoughts; a spell which James broke with a couple blinks, and redirecting his gaze to Harry on the bench.

Snow dusted his hair and collected on his shoulders, nestled in the pronounced wrinkles of his his oversized leather jacket, and thinly carpeted the empty space to his left. The snow wasn’t cold and never melted nor piled on inches; it was pretty sometimes, though in the seconds that passed while James stared at Harry, he was reminded how it also, sometimes, felt like ridicule.

Harry looked to him. Like how the snow accumulated on him, it found places to settle on James. The snow called James a winter’s ghost; enigmatic, out of reach, immortal. It titled him a royal, a prince who designed his own plot to kidnap himself and run away from the world - and it was executed perfectly.

Regality was a trait that ran so delicately through James that it was one of those odd characteristics a person would struggle to name, but _know_ it was there. The snow changed Harry’s perspective on his guardian every so often. In this moment, despite all the high spirits they’d just had, James looked a melancholy soldier of his own making; a disgraced noble; a regular guy standing in the snow.

Harry smiled up at him.

“So whaddya think, James? Did we get to Christmas yet, or did we just miss it?”

“We’re a day late.”

“Aw, nuts.”

Both of them smirked and suppressed laughs at once. “Don’t you even.”

He innocently shrugged. “I was just expressing my disappointment.”

“Mmhmm.”

Getting up with a mandatory fatherly groan, Harry snatched up his pipe and gave it a flip. The steel bounced off his hand and skipped across the grass. Huffing, he followed its path, whisked it out of the green, and strolled to James’s side. He returned the sidelong look with a soft smile.

“The slot machine’s still in the mail, so it’s gonna be a little late, but merry Christmas, bud.”

Two heavy-handed pats to his shoulder later, James tracked Harry with his eyes as he walked ahead. The whole interaction made him feel wistful. A Christmas would be nice. He, and Harry, enjoyed and had celebrated the coveted capitalist holiday throughout their lives; and the idea of observing it again sometime gave him a sweet bit of comfort.

He also actually liked fruitcake.

Talk about a deep, dark secret.

James met Harry’s pace. He slid his hand into his pocket, glanced at the ground, then looked at the jolly middle-aged man alongside him.

“Merry Christmas, Harry.”

He was gifted his beaming smile. “Aw, thanks.”

“I’m not getting you the nuts squirrel.”

“Eeugh!” he scoffed, looking ahead. “Another Christmas ruined.”

“Sorry.”

“No, you’re not.”

“Yeah. I’m not.”

“You get a lot of coal as a kid?”

“Yeah. Enough to power a steam train.”

Harry barked a laugh and gave James a good-natured shove. “Oh, choo!”

His stumble was easily caught, and in his recovery, he grinned a bit back at his aggressor. “Choo?”

“Yeah. It’s train-speak for ‘shoo.’”

“Oh. Nope, I’m out of here,” James ruled, pivoting on a dime and beginning to leave Harry bursting into laughter behind him.

“Oh, come on! James, come— was that _really_ the straw that broke the camel’s back?”

“You’re on your own, Harry.”

“Hey, you started it! Gimme a platform to make puns, and I’m gonna do it! Don’t let our relationship go down the train just yet..”

He stopped dead cold and looked at him over his shoulder. “Really?”

Catching up to him, Harry was all smarm when he replied, “Listen, I do my best to conduct myself well so you aren’t a-freight of me. C’mon. Gimme one more chance?”

This time Harry shuffled some paces back when James shoved him in the chest, taking the direction they were headed. Harry held out his arms. “So it’s a yes?”

“Hurry up.”

As the two returned to their objective, James allowed himself an inward smile. Maybe it _was_ Christmas, or maybe it was still summer. Or fall. Maybe it was sad to wonder how long Harry had _really_ been trapped here and the complications it had on the outside; or even wonder whatever happened to that kid and his slot machine piggy bank.

The snow that fell in Silent Hill didn’t belong on any scenic greeting card, yet it felt enough like the holidays to pretend for an hour. But if it _was_ indeed Christmas, then James would have to (begrudgingly) admit that Harry had made it the best one yet.


End file.
